The Lord of the Rings is not merely a story about good triumphing over evil — it is a theological fever dream of racial purification masquerading as high fantasy. Beneath the pastoral pipe-weed and the quaint Shire cheer lies a myth of moral and racial hygiene so absolute that it annihilates nuance itself. Tolkien’s world is divided not by ideology or class, but by blood and essence. Elves are angelic, Men are fallible but redeemable, Dwarves are stubborn craftsmen — and Orcs? Orcs are the damned: industrial, faceless, and irredeemably other.
The orcs are the colonized, the enslaved, the dark-skinned laborers of Middle-earth’s moral economy. Created through torture and corruption — a mythic eugenics parable — they are denied even the possibility of grace. Their every act is wicked by nature, their voices a cacophony, their speech mocked as gibberish. They are the brown masses upon which the shining West defines itself. When the “Free Peoples” march to destroy Sauron, they are not liberating Middle-earth; they are enacting a crusade of cleansing, a pogrom sanctified by divine light.
The destruction of the Ring — the so-called victory of Good — is the moment of absolute spiritual colonization. The Ring, symbol of power, desire, and autonomy, is cast into the fire not to save the world but to reaffirm that no subaltern hand may ever wield mastery. Power itself must be destroyed rather than allowed to fall into the “wrong” hands, meaning of course, the hands of the impure. Frodo’s journey is not redemptive; it is penitential, a pilgrimage of racial purity culminating in the ritual erasure of the very possibility of orcish sovereignty.
And the aftermath? Mordor burns, its peoples slaughtered without mercy. The text offers no mourning, no remembrance, no funerary honor — because in Tolkien’s theology, the orc is not a being but a blasphemy. The “new age” of Men is nothing less than the triumph of a monotheistic, agrarian, Euro-Christian order over the polytheistic, industrial, and “sin-stained” pagan realm. The orcs’ defeat is genocide written as eschatology — the total obliteration of the racialized Other as the final step toward divine harmony.
The world ends in pastoral silence, the machines stopped, the forges quenched, the “monstrous” races vanished. It is the peace of the grave — the dream of a racially and spiritually pure world. And in that silence, one can almost hear the ghosts of the orc
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